Google has no intention of paying your electric bills – but will help you save more by understanding its usage. Google has recently announced that it will be launching an online Powermeter. What this neat tool will do is to report your energy consumption if you have a smartmeter installed in your home and you will be able to view this information on your iGoogle page. Yes – you will need a smartmeter installed. It’s good that Obama’s stimulus package has a provision for another 40 million smartmeters to be installed.

Certainly a welcome move by Google. From a consumer’s point of view the adoption will be easy as Google will be offering this absolutely free. Hence we can expect almost a 100 percent adoption rate among users of smartmeters. It is also going to do a world of good to companies who are involved in smartmeters and energy management solutions as this is going to increase the awareness of users. After all, home users will still need to go purchase the hardware if they want to use Google’s software.

At the moment it looks like a win-win-win situation for Google, consumers and the energy management folks. But what will be interesting to see is that some of the energy management startups have been selling their applications as proprietary software while Google intends to give its code/API for free. Perhaps Google’s API will just be a platform for other companies to build more powerful analysis tools. Or perhaps consumers will just prefer to look at raw data to perform their own analysis on a simple excel spreadsheet. Only time will tell!

Meanwhile, watch Google Engineers talk about their own experiences with Google Powermeter:

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